Curriculum
Vitae (for the most up-to-date list of
publications, see below)TEACHING:

* Philosophy
of Teaching* Semester-Long
"Deep Learning" Exercise (This "deep-learning
exercise" was composed at "Boot Camp for Professors"
and incorporated into my "Teachings of the Catholic
Church class. I no longer teach "Teachings," but
if I were to use the assignment again, I would likely
substitute Pope John Paul II's Salvifici Doloris
for David Bently Hart's The Doors of the Sea.)
* Student Evaluations (not summaries, but actual
student comments; I have provided the committee with
everything that the Assessment Office was able to
provide me)

* Web Sites of Several Recent Courses Taught (I
ask members merely to click around in these web sites
to get an idea of my approach to teaching. Each
course web site has a copy of the syllabus for the
course at the very top.)

"Natural Law and Grace: How Charity Perfects the
Natural Law," in Faith, Hope, and Love: Thomas
Aquinas on Living by the Theological Virtues,
ed. H. Goris, et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2015),
233-257. (I am not permitted by the
publisher of the volume to link to a pdf of this
article.)

Book review of: Russell
Hittinger, The First Grace: Rediscovering the
Natural Law in a Post-Christian World, in Crisis
(October 2003).

“Thomas Aquinas's Semiosis of
the Old Law in Terms of the Natural Law,” in Semiotics
2002, ed. Scott Simpkins and John Deely
(Ottawa, Canada: Legas, 2003), pp 185-201.

“The Semiotic Function of the
Epigraph in Aquinas' Biblical Prologues and
Sermons: A Mixing of Memory and Desire,” in Semiotics
2001, ed. Scott Simpkins and John Deely
(Ottawa, Canada: Legas, 2002), pp.420-438.

Forthcoming:

"How
Faith Perfects Prudence: Thomas Aquinas on
the Wisdom of the Old Law and the Gift of
Counsel" — article accepted for inclusion
in a volume on the infused virtues to be
published in 2016 by the Thomas Instituut in
Utrecht.

"Retracing the Arts to Sacred Scripture in the
Prologue to Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on
the Gospel of John" — reviewed and accepted
for publication in Nova et
Vetera.

In
Process:

Reading
the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner's
Guide — A book-length study of Thomas
Aquinas’s style of preaching. The book has been
accepted for publication by Emmaus Press and is
currently in process.

Justice in
Homer:Philosophical
Investigations into the Meanings of Themis and Dikē
in the
Homeric Epics — A book-length study of the
meanings of two key concepts that together reveal
Homer's conception of justice in the Iliad and
Odyssey.The
manuscript is finished and is currently under
review by a major university press.

The Clockmaker God and the Myth of the God
of the Gaps — The
image of the “clockmaker” God actually has a long
and interesting history of which the historians
who claim Newton as its originator seem largely
unaware. The clockmaker analogy for God
actually goes very far back in history, and yet
its use to deny the existence of God is actually
relatively recent. Indeed, one would be
hard-pressed to find almost any example of it
before the twentieth century, even in the works of
hard-core Enlightenment philosophes such
as Voltaire or Rousseau, both of whom accepted the
clockmaker God analogy. In this volume, I
trace the "clockmaker" analogy back to Cicero and
then trace various formulations of it, especially
the notion of the machina mundi, through
history up to the relatively recent origins of the
"absent God" interpretation of the "clockmaker"
analogy. This book is approximately
half-written.

The Roots of the Natural
Law Tradition: From Homer to Cicero — This is
the first volume in a planned multi-volume set of
readers of classic texts (with commentary) dealing
with the natural law tradition from Homer to Pope
John Paul II. Volume 2 will deal first with
key biblical texts and then move to a
consideration of Patristic and early Medieval
thinkers, culminating with the work of Thomas
Aquinas. Volume 3 will trace the development
of the tradition from the late Medieval period
through the Renaissance and the Protestant
Reformation. The final volume will deal with
contemporary developments since the Eighteenth
Century. Volume 1 is in process.